Alden Jones: 'Unaccompanied Minors'

Alden Jones, who grew up in Montclair, has written a collection of short stories about disaffected youth.

‘Unaccompanied Minors’

By Alden Jones

(New American Press, 165 pp., $14.95)

While reading the vibrant and varied stories of "Unaccompanied Minors" this week, a friend from my early teen years sent a photo, awash in that orange-y glow of old pictures.

One girl looks down, another smiles shyly and I’m brazen, ready for whatever trouble we can find. I can pretty much guarantee I did not leave my parents’ apartment in that almost-shirt. I have no memory of that day, but we probably wound up in Amy’s bedroom, lip-synching to 45s and going up on the roof to smoke cigarettes while I plotted my escape. My goal was to be an unaccompanied minor.

If your only view of teenagers is in some very distant rearview mirror of the mind, then stories like these could make you wistful, particularly if you were wild. If you have, though, forced yourself to stay awake past your middle-aged bedtime and scanned online police reports as your teenager missed curfew, these become cautionary tales.

Either way, they’re compelling.

The pieces are not connected, other than by Jones, who grew up in Montclair but sets several in Costa Rica. She conjures up people who could easily be ignored; they’re often poor, always young and feckless.

The longest piece, "Flee" is the one with the most depth. Jones seems to strive for a level of discomfort, a reminder that not every minor is sweating over SAT scores or making the soccer team.

Sometimes, as in "Shelter," they are dirty, hungry and having sex for money. There’s a lot of sex and drinking, which is not foreign territory, even to many perpetually accompanied minors.

"Freaks" is a story that lingers. Scales started appearing on Emiline’s arm, and initially, her parents were not concerned; she had been in the sun a lot. Then doctors could not figure out what to do, trying tar, cortisone and baking soda. As unsightly as these scales were, the deeply disturbing problem in this story is of Emiline’s best friend who has anorexia.

"Kristen had gone from 135 pounds to 98 in a matter of six months. The boys found Kristen somewhat grotesque, but the girls mostly envied her, especially the rexies, even while they talked behind her back …

"No one envied you, though. No one wanted an arm that looked like it belonged in the reptile house at the zoo."

Emiline has a lover and talks with her best pal about him. They share the secrets of teenagers, coming into their own, except that Kristen — bright as she is, Ivy League bound — is doing irreparable damage to her health.

Teenagers dealing with some of life's harsher realities populate Alden Jones short stories.

None of these are stories that the reader finishes and thinks, "Wow, that was a day brightener." In "Sin Alley" a young man named Oscar pays younger, less stable teenage boys for sex, and the young prostitutes live in a filthy house run by a man called Cinderella.

Oscar had been studying tourism at school and working in a bar, but he quit school to take on more shifts to support his pregnant sister, Vivi, and her daughter.

"Vivi had been so desperate for her husband’s Y chromosome to meet up with her X that she couldn’t wait out the last months just to find that her hopes had been dashed, and went to Clinica Biblica complaining of stomach pains so they would give her an ultrasound."

Oscar, like other characters in this collection of stories, makes selfish, yet very believable choices.

These unaccompanied minors deal with life’s starkest realities, including death. One little boy, nominally in a babysitter’s care, drowns, but his mother was with him at the time. There are other deaths, sicknesses, addictions and the daily brutality that comes with poverty.

In "Flee," Jones gives herself more space and it works so very well. It’s a story about wealthy kids whose parents place them in a wilderness camp to overcome problems, and opens with:

"We were always hungry, all of us. We fought over food. We tried to trick each other out of fair shares."

In all of the stories, the characters feel genuine and tragic, as they have sex on disgusting sheets or on the floor of a homeless shelter, and scheme about cadging their next drink. Jones understands the art of short stories is in their economy.

By the end, I want to purge thoughts of my stunts as an unaccompanied minor and redouble my efforts regarding my minors.